We have all seen them, prove you are human by finding the motorbikes or flowers, or even ticking a simple tick box. The majority of these are powered by Google reCAPTCHA, a free system to help reduce spam form submissions.
We place these as standard on our customer contact forms, mostly because they are so good in reducing the amount of spam emails you would otherwise receive. Our favourite Google reCAPTCHA is the simple tick box method, or even an invisible captcha that validates your website usage to ascertain if you are human or not.
Google previously offered a generous 1 million interactions per month for free, for each account. Because of this, we used our own account to save our customers the hassle of creating the necessary keys and tokens to sue the Google reCAPTCHA.
On 1st April 2024 (I know, a bad date to make an announcement), Google announced that this free tier will be reduced from 1 million interactions to just 10,000. Over this 10k volume, interactions are charged.
Even at 10k interactions, most websites will do just fine on the free tier
As we had previously set up customers on our own account, when this new limit is officially released we will hit 10k interactions quite easily, so we have been contacting our customers (with high Google reCAPTCHA usage) asking them to create their own accounts and moving them out of our account.
Other customers with lower Google reCAPTCHA usage we have left on our account to save the hassle of moving.
We will continue to use Google reCAPTCHA going forwards but will likely ask you create your own account, it is simple and quick to do and we provide full step by step instructions on how to do this.